A great-grandmother whose 34-inch fingernails snapped off in a car crash has revealed that the accident left her feeling like she had lost part of her identity. Skip related content
Related photos / videos Enlarge photo However, 68-year-old Lee Redmond, of Salt Lake City, Utah, admitted it had become much easier to get around since she was robbed of her record-breaking assets.

Ms Redmond had been growing her nails for 30 years at the time of the crash in February, and they had reached a combined length of 28ft 4in (8.65 metres).

Speaking publicly for the first time since the crash, she said: "Losing my fingernails has been the most dramatic thing that's happened in my life.

"I think it was my grandson that said, 'Grandma, they are like your baby; you've taken care of them for 30 years and lost them in a second'.

"The thing that bothered me with losing the fingernails was that it becomes your identity and I felt like I'd lost part of that."

"Yet I would always say when people would make comments about my fingernails, you know there's more to me than my fingernails."

Ms Redmond currently has 11.5cm (4.5in) of nails and said she has no intention of growing them back to their full former glory.

"People ask if I'm going to grow them again and I say, no, it was a once time thing," she said.

"It took me 30 years to grow them and to get them to that length and they became the world record, and I probably won't live for 30 more years.

"I always did everything with them, but now it's so much easier to do things. The weight is so different. In fact my hands seem to fly with the weight gone."

Ms Redmond spoke about her fingernail trauma to coincide with the launch of the 2010 edition of Guinness World Records.

She appears in the book alongside the male holder of the longest fingernail title, fellow American Melvin Boothe.